The All Blacks continue to rumble on. It may not have been their best performance or even a dominating one at that but at the end of the day they got the win. Before the game, most had called this game a ‘dead rubber’ as there was nothing to play for except pride so it was fair to suggest that we were going to have a lackluster game. When the All Blacks came out and did the “Ka Mate” Haka instead of the bone-chilling “Kapa o Pango”, I knew the All Blacks were not taking this game as seriously.

I normally can gauge how the All Blacks are going to perform based on the Haka. This one was not quite as intense and thus I knew the AB’s are not going to be firing on all cylinders, but still I believed they were going to win. I was exchanging SMS’s with Guru and Manny throughout the game and I must say I was tempted to switch off my phone at one point when the Wallabies were in control of the game and Giteau offloaded that amazing pass for Drew Mitchell’s try. But in typical All Black fashion, Dan Carter had his kicking boots on in the first half and managed to keep the AB’s within distance as the halftime score was 14-9 to the Wallabies.

The All Blacks seemed to wake up in the second half as they started to play rugby. And within minutes of the restart Sivivatu crossed over the line to score a try to level the game. From then on the AB’s were now in control and seemed to step up an extra gear when Stephen Donald was taken off the park and Dan Carter went to play flyhalf and Nonu came on in the centre. Graham Henry’s experiment of fielding Donald at number 10 did not work as well and atleast he saw it early that it was not working and thus decided to reshuffle his line. You could just see the class of Carter when he was now running things from flyhalf. The introduction of Weepu at scrumhalf also seemed to put somemore life into the All Blacks. The depth on the All Blacks bench was clear for all to see as you could see the impact the players coming off the bench made. To round it off, Richie McCaw then crossed over to dot down in the corner to seal the game.

Before and during the game, Guru was going on about the ‘Deans factor’. I have the utmost respect for Robbie Deans as a coach and he does have the ability to influence a game due to his tactics but in this game, when the Wallabies looked good, it was not about the Deans factor but more of the lackluster New Zealand team playing which seemed to be complacent at times and showing signs of disinterest in the game. I was telling Guru that it looked like the All Blacks were out clubbing on Friday night in Hong Kong.

All in all, it just goes to show that even on their off day, the All Blacks can still win and thus they maintain their tag as the number one team in the world.

Wallabies – Tries: Drew Mitchell (2). Conversions: Matt Giteau (2).
All Blacks – Tries: Sitiveni Sivivatu, Richie McCaw. Penalties: Dan Carter (3).



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